New York City The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds over 1,000 objects that once belonged to people who have been charged or convicted of crimes against antiquities, according to a report released today by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Of the 1,109 objects in question, 309 of them are currently on display throughout the museum, including artifacts linked to disgraced art dealers such as Subhash Kapoor and Douglas Latchford.
Spencer Woodman, one of the contributing journalists, said Hyperallergic by email that in the past year, The Met “has seen more seizures by law enforcement than any other moment in its history.”
THE slew of convulsions raised questions for Woodman about how many items in the Met’s collection could be traced to people linked to the illegal antiquities trade. “We thought a fundamental starting point would be to ask the simple question of reporting how many pieces does the Met’s catalog link to people who have been charged or convicted of crimes related to antiquities,” said explained Woodman. “The response – over a thousand – surprised us.”
THE ICIJ report indicates that less than 50% of the 1,109 objects have records of their departure from their country of origin. For example, ICIJ alleges that only three of the 250 Nepalese and Kashmiri objects in question have records of origin, and of 94 Kashmiri relics in particular, only four have ownership records from before 1970, the year that UNESCO has adopted new standards for the provenance of the objects in the interest of the protection of cultural property against trafficking.
Another contributing journalist, Malia Politzer of ICIJ partner Discovered financessaid Hyperallergic that the report focused primarily on Nepali and Kashmiri artifacts because the corresponding acquisition dates at the Met corresponded to years when the regions were plundered amid deadly conflict.
“Until 1950, Nepal was basically closed to foreigners, which meant there wasn’t much of a market for antiques,” Politzer explained. “Then, in 1956, the country passed a law prohibiting the export of cultural property. This is an extremely narrow acquisition window. And if you look at the earliest provenance of most Nepalese antiquities at the Met, that date is almost always after 1956 – which strongly suggests the objects were looted.
In response to Hyperallergicrequest for comments from ICIJsaid a Met spokesperson: “Obviously the standards of collecting have changed over the past few decades – as a contemporary reading of the Met manager’s words from half a century ago make very clear.”
“The field has evolved and The Met has been a leader in that progress,” the spokesperson continued. “In addition to our commitment to all laws and professional standards, our actions are guided by three activities: research, transparency and collaboration. This work is described at length in metmuseum.orgwhich also lists many of the recent returns we have made on our own initiative, including four to Nepal.
The report highlights the Met’s unguarded acquisition history as a model of the museum’s current seizure and repatriation situation. Being more than a century younger than its European counterparts such as the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, the Met went on a huge buying spree in the 1960s, under the direction of the museum’s former director Thomas Hoving. In an effort to compete with institutions across the pond, Hoving and his museum administration focused on revitalizing their antiquities collection, regardless of how the objects were purchased, ICIJsays the report.
ICIJ quote Hoving overwhelming memoir of 1994, peppered with references to contraband from overseas, throughout the report. As director of the Met from 1967 to 1977, Hoving wrote about approving the acquisition of large numbers of Cambodian and Indian antiquities despite his suspicions that they had been smuggled into the country and that his address book of “smugglers and fixers” and other art-world knowledge “was longer than anyone else in the field”.
That being said, it seems like a lot of antiques seem to fall through the cracks, including this Sandstone sculpture of Indian origin of a celestial dancer (Devata) linked to a disgraced antiques dealer Subhash Kapoor and its Art of the Past gallery, offered by Florence and Herbert Irving in 2015.
